How Middlesbrough could free up £15k p/w on their wage bill in January | OneFootball

Boro could free up a significant amount of money from their wage bill in the new year with two moves...

Middlesbrough will be hoping to conduct some smart business in the January transfer window and moving on two fringe players could free up £15,000 from their weekly wage bill.

Michael Carrick will be hoping to orchestrate a successful promotion push in the second half of the 2024/25 season at the Riverside Stadium, which would see the Teessiders put an end to what will be an eight-year exile from the Premier League.

Middlesbrough have become shrewd operators in the transfer market in recent times, with the club's recruitment team fronted by head of football Kieran Scott implementing a philosophy of buying low and selling high to great effect.

Gone are the days of splurging eye-watering transfer fees and dishing out large wage packets to players, and as a result, Middlesbrough appear to be in the healthiest financial position they've been in for a number of years.

However, they won't be resting on their laurels in that regard, with Boro's decision-makers always looking for ways to save money and free up funds for reinvestment, and there are two players firmly in the Rockliffe Park shadows that could allow them to do just that...

Middlesbrough outcast Matthew Hoppe looks destined to depart

New year is the time to make resolutions with the future in mind, and for Middlesbrough forward Matthew Hoppe, his will surely be to put an end to his Riverside Stadium nightmare.

The American international arrived on Teesside in the summer of 2022 from Spanish side RCD Mallorca, in a deal understood to have been worth £2.5m, with Boro penning him to a four-year contract.

He'd made the switch to Middlesbrough with the hope of securing more regular game time, having made just seven competitive appearances for Mallorca the season before.

With Boro having splashed out a considerable transfer fee to acquire him, it certainly won't have been in anyone's thinking that he would only have made six first-team appearances for the club over two years later.

Now understood to be earning £10,000 per-week as per Capology - whose figures are an estimate - the 23-year-old wasn't even handed a shirt number by Middlesbrough at the start of the season, and wasn't registered as part of Carrick's 25-man squad.

This has left him ineligible to play a part for Boro in the first half of the season and resigned him to academy football. For a player who'd scored a Bundesliga hat-trick as a teenager for Schalke back in 2021, to say his career hasn't followed the trajectory he and many would've expected it to is perhaps an understatement.

With seemingly no future on Teesside whatsoever, Hoppe looks certain to leave the club in the near future. Should that come in January, Boro could free up £10,000 off their wage bill, which could be reinvested into a contract extension for a star player, or used to supplement the wage packet of a new addition.

Boro goalkeeper Tom Glover appears to have fallen firmly down the pecking order

Tom Glover entered the 2024/25 season hoping to push Seny Dieng for the starting gloves in the Middlesbrough goal this term but has now found himself relegated to third choice at the Riverside.

The emergence of Sol Brynn has seen the fight for a starting spot be contested between Boro's academy product and their Senegalese international and has left the former Australian youth international firmly on the fringes of Carrick's squad.

Having signed on a free transfer from Melbourne City FC in July 2023, Glover was granted an extended opportunity to stake his claim for the number one role from mid-December 2023 to late February 2024, as Dieng was sidelined through injury.

However, the majority of his performances perhaps only served to solidify Dieng's position in the goalkeeping hierarchy that season, as the former Tottenham academy product struggled between the sticks.

Earning a reported £5,000 per week for the 2024/25 season as per Capology, he could be a prime candidate for a winter exit in the new year and could free up another chunk of Middlesbrough's wage bill to be reinvested elsewhere if they so desire.